Page:The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.djvu/16

Rh empire, the southern boundary of which approached Tamilakam, or the land of the Tamils, in the southern-most portion of the peninsula. Buddhism was paramount, and non-Aryan races were in power, almost everywhere throughout India. To the Aryan races it was a period of humiliation, and to Brahminism one of painful struggle for existence. When, in later years, Brahminism was again favored by royalty, it appears to have exerted all its energy, to erase every trace of the rival faith and foreign dominion. Accordingly we find that the Sanscrit literature of the first century of the Christian era is now a perfect blank. Curiously enough, a considerable portion of the Tamil literature of that very period has come down to us, almost intact, and reveals to us the condition of not only the Tamils, but also of other races who inhabited the rest of India in that remote age.

The vast field of ancient Tamil literature is like an unknown land into which no traveller hath yet set foot. Many of the ancient classical works in Tamil have but recently seen the light. Hitherto they were preserved in manuscript on palmyra leaves, and jealously hidden by those Pandits into whose hands they had fallen. The archaic language in which they were composed, and the alien religions they favoured, alike prevented their becoming popular with Tamil students. In fact some of them were forbidden in Tamil schools, and Saiva or Vaishnava pandits deemed it an unpardonable sin to teach them to their pupils. Most of these manuscripts lay neglected in the libraries of Saiva or Jain monasteries: and there they would have crumbled to dust but for the enterprise of a few scholars who have with considerable labour and research, rescued most of them from oblivion and published them in print. Several valuable works however still remain in manuscript, accessible only to a few individuals.

It is the general opinion of Western scholars that there was